Maggie Gyllenhaal as Charlotte Dalrymple and Hugh Dancy as Mortimer Granville in "Hysteria," about the invention of the vibrator to cure what ails women.

Maggie Gyllenhaal as Charlotte Dalrymple and Hugh Dancy as Mortimer Granville in "Hysteria," about the invention of the vibrator to cure what ails women.

Photo: Liam Daniel, Sony Pictures Classics

'Hysteria': Dancy finds pleasure in bawdy story

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On a recent morning, Hugh Dancy is on the phone from New York, pondering the appeal of Mortimer Granville, the English doctor he plays in Tanya Wexler's "Hysteria," a Victorian period comedy that balances romance with broad, bawdy humor. The movie is a fiction, built around a true morsel culled from the real Granville's life: He is the man who invented the vibrator in the 1880s.

"Really, what they liked was his name more than anything else, although it is true that he did invent this thing," Dancy jokes of the motivation of Wexler, the film's producers and screenwriters Stephen Dyer and Jonah Lisa Dyer. "I have a feeling that if he had been named Joe Blogs, they would have chucked it away and started from scratch.

"He did two things brilliant in his life, this man. One was to invent the vibrator by mistake and the other was to be named Mortimer Granville."

It was writer Howard Gensler who first related the story of Granville and his invention to producer Tracey Becker. The doctor devised it as a means of relieving aching muscles, but the machine - which was marketed as "Granville's Hammer" - was soon repurposed to treat "hysteria," the female complaint of the age.

From those facts, Becker realized that there was a film to be made. She recruited Wexler to the project, and the two of them drafted the Dyers to invent a scenario and write a screenplay. The pair came up with a tale in which Granville joins the practice of a doctor, Robert Dalrymple (Jonathan Pryce), who specializes in treating hysteria and who becomes romantically entangled with his boss' daughters, the conventional Emily (Felicity Jones) and suffragist Charlotte (Maggie Gyllenhaal). According to Wexler, the Dyers wrote Granville with the young Hugh Grant in mind.

"I thought, 'Who is the new Hugh Grant?' " Wexler says of her casting dilemma during a recent visit to San Francisco, where "Hysteria" screened at the San Francisco International Film Festival.

"It was tricky finding an actor who had this kind of naivete of the period, a fresh, young, handsome, almost male-ingenue, who also was smart and worldly in a different way," she says. "I think Hugh Dancy is totally the heir to that throne. He's smart, he's precise, he's witty, he's brilliant."

Since October, the 36-year-old British actor has been starring on Broadway in "Venus in Fur," a two-hander in which he plays a playwright-director who has an intense confrontation with an ambitious actress and for which he has been nominated for a Drama Desk Award for outstanding actor in a play. In the fall, he will be seen in "Hannibal," a kind of prequel to Thomas Harris' "Red Dragon," playing Will Graham in an NBC series that will examine the early relationship between the criminal profiler and killer Hannibal Lecter.

A starring role

Onscreen, Dancy most recently appeared in supporting roles in "Our Idiot Brother" and "Martha Marcy May Marlene," but he has also enjoyed his share of leads in such films as "Beyond the Gates," "The Jane Austen Book Club" and "Adam." When "Hysteria" came his way, it was the story as much as the opportunity to play the starring role that attracted him to the project.

"In something like this, the character and the story really are one and the same," he says. "I don't think you can have an interesting character that spans an entire movie if there isn't a decent story. Once you get to playing more of a lead role, it's really about the situation that that character goes through and how he responds to it. They're kind of intricately bound up.

"I felt that my challenge in particular was to unify the movie as best as I could without being too obvious about it. I felt it was quite a lot of heavy lifting in that respect, because it swings almost eccentrically between a bawdy sex comedy and a kind of costume-drama romantic comedy. I think we succeeded in that, and that's part of the movie's charm."

At the outset, the film presents Granville as a man slightly ahead of his time, someone who keeps up with the latest literature and has a firm grasp on science. He keeps losing jobs not because he's a bad doctor but because his beliefs and practices put him at odds with the medical establishment.

Yet when he goes to work for Dr. Dalrymple, he never questions his superior's diagnosis of hysteria - which covers any range of female complaints and men's complaints about women - or its treatment, which prescribes that the doctor manually stimulate his patient to the point of "paroxysm."

Astonishing thing

"The comedy comes from the fact that these men don't know what they're doing," Dancy says. "Mortimer's pretty forward thinking, and yet he can't see past this thing right in front of his face. That's the most astonishing thing, and I think the funniest thing in the movie. It is also, I think, the one thing that really is true, which is that all these great medical minds of their time completely failed to see what they were up to."

In discussing the character with Wexler, it was the romantic angle with Gyllenhaal's Charlotte that concerned him more than the rest. Theirs is the meeting of opposites, the buttoned-down Victorian doctor clashing with the fiery suffragist, and Mortimer is as clueless when it comes to her as he is with his supposedly hysterical patients.

Sparring and a spark

"I thought the more we could see them sparring, the more you could see that there is some kind of spark between them, even just in the wordplay and the kind of verbal back and forth," Dancy says. "Then you buy the rest of it. To me, that was more important than, 'Oh, great, he figures out whether hysteria exists or not.' That's all very well, but frankly, the jury's come back in on that one now. We don't really need to educate anybody.

"When we started out, I felt I could help bring a bit more spark to the relationship between Maggie's character and mine. It would have been very boring if it had just been a process of Mortimer being shown the error of his ways. That is not hot." {sbox}

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